Paper exposure, tax-advantaged physical ownership, or full direct control. Here's how the three approaches actually differ.
A Gold ETF (like GLD or IAU) gives you paper exposure to gold's price movement through a brokerage account — you never touch physical metal, and the fund holds (or in some structures, references) gold on your behalf. A Gold IRA and physical-at-home ownership both involve actual physical metal, but differ in tax treatment and storage requirements.
ETFs are the most liquid by far — tradeable instantly during market hours like a stock, with no shipping, storage, or dealer negotiation involved. Physical gold, whether in an IRA or at home, requires finding a buyer and executing a physical transaction, which takes longer and involves a wider bid-ask spread (the premium/discount structure covered in our premiums guide).
This is the most-cited reason investors choose physical gold over ETFs: an ETF represents a claim on gold managed by a fund structure, introducing a layer of counterparty and structural risk that direct physical ownership avoids entirely. For investors specifically seeking to eliminate counterparty risk, this is a meaningful distinction, even though major gold ETFs are generally considered low-risk, well-regulated structures in practice.